We're in Fairfield, a few minutes away from Travis Air Force base, one of the last few remaining military installations in the Bay Area. We've come through miles of drought-desiccated fields and baked brown hills to visit what's arguably the most conservative place in Northern California: the Jelly Belly candy factory.
This is where right-wingnut Rick Santorum threw a well-attended fundraiser during his short-lived bid for president in 2012. It is easy to understand why he and his Tea Party followers would feel comfortable here. The place is in many ways a Wal-Mart-sized shrine to Ronald Reagan.
You see, without jelly beans, American would not have won the Cold War. Maybe. Probably. Reagan was no doubt a bean addict: He kicked smoking by swapping tobacco pipes for jelly beans. The sugar pellets became such an integral part of his life that, as he told Jelly Belly in a letter of praise written while he was California's governor, Reagan and his advisers could hardly "make a decision without passing around a jar of jelly beans."
We know Reagan carried this habit with him to the White House. Thus, the implication is that hints of licorice and a blast of buttered popcorn rolled around his lips while he denied the existence of AIDS, ramped up the drug war, slashed Great Society social services to ribbons, and watched the Soviet Union implode.
That is quite the legacy.
The Reagan-Jelly Belly love is mutual. You see the first "portrait" of Dutch within seconds of walking through the sliding glass doors. This Reagan is made of jelly beans, of course, as are several other Reagans (at least one including Just Say No Nancy) hung around the factory.
The Jelly Belly factory makes 149 other diabetic nightmares — fudge, candy corn, nonpareils — in addition to the beans. But this is Sunday; the machines are still. Which leaves only our tour guide, a determinedly energetic young woman, to lead us to a series of TV monitors positioned along a carpeted catwalk above the factory floor, where Jelly Belly's autobiography flashes before us on screens.
We learn that jelly beans became the company's signature product only in 1976, during Reagan's second term as governor, when an outsider — a Los Angeles lawyer and jelly bean fan — convinced the company's owners, the Goelitz family, to make good jelly beans. Jelly beans with natural flavors. Jelly beans that taste just like their advertised descriptions.
And, by gum, those popcorn beans do taste just like popcorn.
That leads us to the most interesting thing about Jelly Belly: the secrets of its flavor magicians. How do they make them taste so spot-on? You never find out by going on the tour. You do learn how the beans are made. They begin as little balls of sugar before they're baked, rolled, and polished in a series of ovens and tumblers. And you are reminded, time and again, which world leader loved the beans so much.
You can judge a man's character, Reagan supposedly said, by how he consumes his jelly beans: one-by-one, or by the handful. That's on my mind when I sidle up to the tasting bar after the tour ends. Along with the predictable favorites, there are gag flavors: lawn clippings, dirt, vomit. I opt for the first two. Any doubts I had were drowned in the kale-like taste of just-cut grass, and in soil's iron and nitrogen notes. There are geniuses at work here, and their secrets are safe.
We make our exit and head back into the 97-degree heat, bearing several two-pound bags of misshapen, rejected jelly beans — "belly flops," they're called — which will be consumed within hours the next day back at SF Weekly headquarters.
Like Reagan, jelly beans aren't for everybody. Like Reagan, they could be bad for you. But also like Reagan, they offer a promise. If you close your eyes and roll them around in your mouth, with a little imagination, you can almost convince yourself you're eating the real thing.
Until it's dissolved, and all that's left is the inevitable sugar crash.
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